


pictis pennas

by yuuya



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! Zexal
Genre: Implied Sexual Content, M/M, Post-Canon, Species Dysphoria, Trans Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-06
Updated: 2016-08-06
Packaged: 2018-07-29 16:26:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 648
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7691506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuuya/pseuds/yuuya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alit is comfortable in his human skin in ways alien to Mizael. Alit wears it as though he was never once the brightest of their stars, as though he's never been anything more than flesh and blood, and yet even without any light left to them he shines out so brightly that Mizael feels as though he ought to shade his eyes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	pictis pennas

**Author's Note:**

> written for zexalmonth week 2; had the word 'worship' in mind from the prompts list but it kind of wandered away from that
> 
> mizael is dyspraxic in this fic; as a note, some of his internal shit with regards to that is kind of ableist so heads-up if you're not comfortable with that?
> 
> (also he's actually intended to be intersex in this fic, specifically i had CAIS in mind! but there wasn't really a way to get that explicitly across whoops)

They trace patterns across each other's skin; stars and constellations in Alit's freckles, shapes and pictures in Mizael's vitiligo, cataloguing all the ways that these bodies are _marked, imperfect_. Trace out all the things they'll never see and feel again, try to connect to the stars and the songs and the snuffed-out cores of what they used to be.

(there's a thin white line around Alit's throat, pale against the dark skin; there are dark little birthmarks scattered across Mizael's torso; they've had these shapes before but what's a past life when you've been the stars?)

Alit is comfortable in his human skin in ways alien to Mizael. Alit wears it as though he was never once the brightest of their stars, as though he's never been anything more than flesh and blood, and yet even without any light left to them he shines out so brightly that Mizael feels as though he ought to shade his eyes. As though he ought to drop to his knees before him, and if it were Alit he's not even sure it would be embarrassing, even with the indignity of a being like him prostrating himself before _anyone_.

He won't do it, but he thinks he could.

Mizael can't wear the flesh the way that Alit does. Mizael is gangly, is sharp edges and softness all in the same breath but in ways that don't _work_ , in ways that have humans looking at him askance in passing, have them trying to _classify_ him and uncomfortable when they fail to do so. Mizael does not _match_ , he discovers the first time that he and Alit come together in the only way the human bodies allow, because Mizael has the parts that they call _female_ but he most certainly _isn't that _.__

Even beyond the shape of him, he's not-- he's not _suited_ for humanity in the way that Alit is. Light-blotched skin and the ghost of the arrows and the scars he picks up because he forgets, sometimes, how he ought to move a body that's flesh and blood and oh so fragile. Clumsy hands and unintelligible handwriting and the ways that even when he remembers how to move the body, sometimes it just won't _do_ it, and Mizael doesn't remember things ever being so hard when he was a Barian, even when they wore the flesh bodies then.

(Durbe is intrigued by humanity and the way it works, now; Durbe watches Mizael and reads and reads and finds the _words_ for the trouble he's having, and Mizael thinks of _course_ ; of course he got a _broken_ body, of course he got one that's mismatched and marked and incapable of functioning, as though having a human body in the first place isn't _bad enough_ )

He doesn't wear the body the way that Alit can. Doesn't _fit_ with humanity, doesn't _like_ it.

Alit doesn't seem to care, though. He looks at Mizael's gangly, inelegant flesh and calls him _beautiful_ , calls him _an angel_ , pulls him close and kisses him and runs fingers over Mizael's shoulder blades like he's expecting to find wings there. Mizael is the one who feels as though he ought to prostrate himself before Alit's wonder and yet Alit is the one who does it without a second thought; kneels himself at Mizael's feet and looks up at him as though he's _everything_ , as though every bit of his snuffed-out light still shines through in this human flesh.

_You're perfect_ , Alit breathes into his skin and when Mizael tries to argue that he's anything but, Alit only laughs and says, _that's what **makes** you perfect, silly_.

(when Mizael discovers tattoos he bears the pain to give himself a shadow of the wings that Alit always reaches for, and in Alit's face when the other sees them he thinks that, finally, he finds something that has him not hating this body entirely)


End file.
